NYCPHP Meetup

[Steve Manes]

Joshua S. Freeman wrote:
  > The problem is, on submit, I need different form values to be 
submitted to
> different tables in the database.  How do I build an insert statement like
> that?

You can't.  You need to build lots of insert statements, ideally wrapped 
in a transaction so you can roll back in case one of them fails.

> How is *this* accomplished?  *this* being... asking for someone to somehow
> insert the local image path and then, on submit, moving the image to the
> right place on the server and creating the 'url' that goes into the database
> and putting it in the database?

You definitely don't want to write to user-provided directories.  There 
are a number of solutions, one of them something I've done for years and 
what we do at CCI as well.  Assign a unique id to the image, convert 
that id to an MD5 hash, breaking it out into two or three nodes like 
957/ae1.  Then you would write the image to 
IMAGE_DIR/957/ae1/IMAGE_ID.gif (or whatever extension).

To play it back to the user's browser:

<?php
     $hash_string  = md5($image_id);
     $node1 = substr($hash_string, 0, 3);
     $node2 = substr($hash_string, 3, 3)
     $image_ref = IMAGE_DIR . "/$node1/$node2/${image_id}.gif";
?>

     <IMG SRC="<?= $image_ref ?>" BORDER="0">;

An added advantage to this approach is that it balances out the image 
directory tree naturally so you don't have ten zillion files in the 
"Jan" directory and only a few in the "Feb" directory.